Abstract
Most works on the roles and status of women in society emphasize family structure and a kinship-based division of labor. The reasons for this are self-evident: in the eyes of both social scientists and the social actors themselves, there is generally a strong association among women, the domestic sphere, and the organization of family and kinship activities. Age and gender serve, on either a formal or informal basis, as major organizational mechanisms in all known societies, and in preindustrial society often provide the primary differentiating principles in the division of labor.1 A significant aspect of the process of economic development is the separation of certain types of economic activities from the kin-or family-based production unit, or the allocation of economic tasks on the basis of criteria other than age, gender, or kinship. Never-theless, in both “developing” economies and in “developed” societies, gender remains a crucial element, in real if not in jural terms, in the division of labor. Equally, while the structure and function of the family inevitably change with economic development, and specifically with the process of urbanization, its significance in social and economic organization, in socialization, and in reproduction may alter but not necessarily diminish.
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Notes
See J.S. La Fontaine, ed., Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
See Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), part 1.
See Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974);
Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975);
Ernestine Friedl, Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1976); Critique of Anthropology (Women’s Issue) 3, nos. 9 and 10 (1977).
See La Fontaine, ed., Sex and Age; Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Family,” in Harry Shapiro, ed., Man, Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
F. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973).
See Annette Kuhn, “Structures of Patriarchy and Capital in the Family”; Beechey, “Women and Production: A Critical Analysis of Some Sociological Theories of Women’s’ Work”; McIntosh “The State and the Oppression of Women,” all in Annette Kuhn and Annemarie Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
See Wallman, “Difference, Differentiation, Discrimination,” Journal of Community Relations Commission (Summer 1976).
Edholm, Harris, Young, “Conceptualising Women,” Critique of Anthropology 3, no. 9 (1977), p. 123.
See Conrad Arensberg and S.T. Kimball, “The Small Family Farm in Ireland” in Anderson, ed., The Sociology of the Family (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971)
and W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918; New York: Octagon Press, 1971).
For discussions of family form in cross-cultural perspective, see Lévi-Strauss, “The Family”; Gough, “The Origin of the Family”; W. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963)
J. Goody, ed., Kinship (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).
See J.S. La Fontaine, “The Free Women of Kinshasa,” in Davis, ed., Choice and Change (London: London School of Economics, 1974).
See S. Amin, Neo-Colonialism in West Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 43–47;
Keith Hart, “Urbanization, the Post-Colonial State and Petty Commodity Production in Ghana,” unpublished paper presented at the Past and Present Society Annual Conference on Towns and Economic Growth, University College, London, 1975, pp. 6, 7;
Gloria Marshall, “The State of Ambivalence: Right and Left Options in Ghana,” Review of African Political Economy 5 (1976).
K. Hart, “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana,” Journal of Modern African Studies (1973): 11, 68.
P. Kennedy, “Cultural Factors Affecting Entrepreneurship and Development in the Informal Economy of Ghana,” IDS Bulletin 8, no. 2 (1976): 18.
See J. Z. Giele, “United States: A Prolonged Search for Equal Rights,” and M. Sokolowska, “Poland: Women’s Experience under Communism,” both in J.Z. Giele and A. Smock, eds., Women: Roles and Statutes in Eight Countries (New York: Wiley, 1977);
HMSO, “Social Commentary: Men and Women,” Social Trends 5 (1974).
See also D.F. McCall, “Trade and the Role of Wife in a Modern West African Town,” in A. Southall, ed., Social Change in Modern Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961);
M. Little, African Women in Towns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
See Peil, “Female Roles in West African Towns,” in J. Goody, ed., Changing Social Structure in Ghana (International African Institute, 1975).
S. Mintz, “Men, Women and Trade,” Comparative Studies in Sociology and History 13 (1968): 265.
M. Katzin, “The Role of the Small Entrepreneur,” in M. Herskovits and M. Harwitz, Economic Transition in Africa (Evanston, Ill: North-western University Press, 1974);
D. Garlick, African Traders and Economic Development in Ghana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
See Goode, World Revolution and Family; C. Oppong, Marriage Among a Matrilineal Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Morris, “Women Without Men,” British Journal of Sociology (September 1979);
and R.T. Smith, “The Matrifocal Family” in J. Goody, ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
E. Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970).
Human Resources in Development Division, UNESCO, “Women: The Neglected Human Resource in African Development,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 5, no. 2 (1972).
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Pine, F. (1982). Family Structure and the Division of Labor: Female Roles in Urban Ghana. In: Alavi, H., Shanin, T. (eds) Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16847-7_30
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